Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

We’re diving into the first of the “I AM” statements.  And we’re gonna find it in John 6.  Let me just focus on our attention on one verse by way of introduction.  John 6:35.  Jesus, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”  Now, the price of bread isn’t’ what it used to be, is it?  If you’ve done any shopping in the grocery stores lately, you understand what I’m talking about.  In fact, I did a little research this week, and I discovered that in 1940 $1 bought ten loaves of bread.  Do the math.  That’s 10 cents a loaf.  Pretty amazing, isn’t it?  In 1950, $1 bought five loaves of bread.  In 1960 $1 bought four loaves of bread.  In 1970 $1 bought three loaves of bread.  Last night I went down to the grocery store, and I bought a loaf of bread.  You know what it cost me?  $3.69.  It’s called inflation, isn’t it? And you know the impact of that.  Does anybody want a free loaf of bread this morning?  I‘ve got one here.  Anybody?  Anybody?  You look like you can catch.  There you go, sir.  Free loaf of bread.  Don't let anybody tell you there ain’t no free lunch in this world.  You just got a free loaf of bread this morning.  And we are in these “I AM” statements.  And we are with statement #1 where Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.  And he who believes in me shall never hunger, and he who comes to me shall never thirst.”  Now, that statement is found John 6, and there is a lot happening in John 6.  It is a long chapter.  It’s some 70 verses.  We’re not gonna be able to read through all of them, but let me just kind of set the stage here for verse 35 when Jesus makes this statement, “I am the bread of life.”

0:02:10.1

Two thousand years Jesus gathered with a group of people on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee.  They had been following Him around.  He had been teaching.  And by, oh, noontime, early afternoon, they got hungry.  And it was a big crowd.  The Bible says about 5000 men and their families.  So you do the math there.  It could have been a crowd as large as 10 or 15,000 people, hungry people.  And Jesus looks at His disciples, and He says to them, “We need to feed these people.”  And they look at one another and say, “Well, we don’t have enough food to feed these people, and we don’t have enough money to go into the next town and buy enough food to feed all these people.”  And He says, “Well, what do you have?”  And they said, “Well, there is a little boy over here, and he has a sack lunch.”  And He says, “Great.  Let Me have it.”  And He grabs this little boy’s sack lunch.  And the Bible says there were five barley loaves and two fish in that little boy’s sack lunch.  And Jesus bowed His head and He gave thanks and He blessed it.  And He started handing out baskets of fishes and loaves.  And they just kept coming and kept coming.  And the disciples went up on the hillside and fed these 5000 people plus their families and all that with five barley loaves and two fishes.  It was a miracle.  We know it was “the feeding of the 5,000” plus.  And the disciples are scratching their head wondering, How did this happen?  Well, the people quickly ascertained that Jesus was a special prophet, and they wanted to make Him king.  And that’s when the Bible says He slipped out and went to the mountains to be by Himself.  Well, the afternoon went by; evening came.  The disciples are looking for Jesus.  He’s nowhere to be found.  But they decide to get in a boat to sail to Capernaum.  Capernaum was Peter’s hometown, and most scholars believe that was the ministry headquarters for Jesus and His disciples.  They figured maybe Jesus would catch up with them later.  Well, they get on the boat.  They’re sailing across the Sea of Galilee, and a storm hits the sea.  And it’s a fierce storm, and it puts fear in the hearts of the disciples.  What scared them even more is when they found Jesus walking on the water.  They take Him into the boat.  He speaks peace to the storm and peace to their heart, and the Bible says immediately the boat was on the shore at Capernaum.  Another miracle.  And so now Jesus and His disciples are in Capernaum.  The people who were fed the day before, they wake up the next day.  They go looking for Jesus.  He’s nowhere to be found.  They know the disciples went to Capernaum.  They get in their boats.  They sail across the sea, and they find Jesus there in Capernaum.  And they get into a conversation with Him.  You know, He had just fed their hungry bellies.  And He says to them, “You’re following me just ‘cause, you know, I satisfied your physical appetite.”  And He begins to transition that miracle and help them understand that there are spiritual lessons for them to learn from that little fishes and loaves exercises they went through the day before.

0:05:01.2

And that brings us to verse 35, where Jesus says to this crowd, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”  Those are amazing words, amazing words.  They’re also peculiar words.  It makes me think, as a student of the Bible, why the bread of life?  Why not “the filet mignon of life”?  I mean, come on, if we’re gonna sit down and have a meal, let’s have a really good one.  Why not “the lobster cocktail of life”?  I mean, why did Jesus choose such a common food metaphor like bread?  I mean, you can go down to the grocery store today and, yeah, it’s more expensive than it was in 1940, but a loaf of bread only sets you back three of four dollars.  And who’s to tell what it was back in Jesus’s day.  Why something so common?  Bread is commonplace, isn’t it?  But that’s the point, because the Savior of the world, the Son of God who came down from heaven to earth, came to identify with common, everyday people like you and me, who are just trying to put bread on the table.  He didn’t say, “I am the caviar of life,” ‘cause if He did, He would only identify with the elite and the wealthy.  And this reminds me of the words of the apostle Paul in his letter to the Philippians.  Paul writes these words about Jesus.  “Being in very nature, God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on the cross.”  Yeah, that’s the whole…at least one of the points of the bread metaphor is Jesus, if I could say, is a populist’s God who identifies with common people.  And so whether you can afford to eat at Panera bread or you get your bread at the local food shelter, Jesus can identify with you.  He’s here for you.  He is the Bread of Life.  He’s the bread that sustains your life, not just physically, but spiritually as well.

0:07:22.1

Now, Jesus does another thing here.  He wants his listeners on that hillside who received the fishes and loaves miracle to make a connection to the Old Testament and to a story there that every Jew was familiar with.  And the story I’m talking about is the one about the manna.  You remember the manna that came down from heaven?  Look in John 6:32-33.  Jesus says to the crowd, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.  For the bread of God,” listen to this, “is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  Now He’s taking the physical illustration and He’s teaching a spiritual lesson here.  And He take them back to the Old Testament.  And He says, “You remember that story when the Israelites, you know, you came out of Egypt and all the slavery?”  And they come into the wilderness.  It wasn’t long before they started grumbling and complaining because, you know, the food was better in Egypt.  And Moses goes to the Lord and said, “Come on, you know, we’ve got to feed the people.”  And He says, “Great, I’m gonna send you manna from heaven every day.”  Manna literally means “what is it”.  You ever had somebody put a meal in front of you and you go, “What is it?”  Well, that that was kind of their reaction when the manna came down from heaven, but it came down every day, little flakes of manna.  And they had manna pancakes for breakfast and then manna burgers for lunch and…I don’t know.  They made manna out of everything for 40 long years.  And it’s taken all these years later for Jesus to connect His life now to what God was doing back here.  He says, “I am the bread that came down from heaven to give you sustenance and to provide food for your soul.”  He is the essential One.  He is the eternal food for our souls.  He is sufficient to satisfy our deepest hunger.

0:09:21.4

And Jesus is also the one who taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” right?  And, again, the Old Testament Israelites learned the importance of that daily dependence upon our necessities from the heavenly Father, because the manna worked something like this.  If you were tempted to store it up and put, you know, days’ or weeks’ worth of manna in your food pantry, it would rot by the end of the day.  And so God wanted the Israelites to go through the daily experience of collecting the bread from heaven to understand how daily they were dependent upon the Lord for necessities.  Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”  He’s also the one that, when He was tempted by the devil in the wilderness…remember after those 40 days of fasting in the wilderness.  And He was hungry at the end of 40 days, as any human being would be.  And the devil comes to Him and says, “Well, You’re God.  You’re the Savior.  Why don’t You turn these stones over here into bread?”  And do you remember what Jesus said?  He said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”  So Jesus takes this very common substance, this bread, and teaches a very important spiritual principle.  He wanted those people on the hillside 2000 years ago and us today to understand this very important idea.  You can have a full stomach…and most of us in this room do.  I mean, how many of us have missed a meal this week?  You can have a full stomach but an empty life.  And the only way to have a full stomach and a full life or an empty stomach and a full life is to meet the One who says “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, whoever believes in me,” He says, “will never, ever thirst.”  “It isn’t about filling your empty bellies,” He says.  “You followed me across the sea to Capernaum to come find me,” He said to the crowd, “because your bellies are full?  Come on.  You have much greater needs than just your physical needs.  I created you with a spiritual need to know Me.  And you’ll only satisfy the deep hunger and the deep thirst in your soul if you get to know Me, who is the bread of life.”  Bread for the stomach without bread for the soul leaves us empty, doesn’t it, because we were created to know God.  We were created in a way…our software is coated in a way that the only way for us to get satisfaction in life is to meet the Bread of Life who will satisfy us.  But a lot of us are doing the Mick Jagger thing.  You know, we’ve come to that place in our life where we realize, “I can’t get no satisfaction.  I’ve tried drugs, sex, rock and roll.  I’ve tried money and success, power.  And they satisfy for a moment, but they don’t last.”  It’s kind of like eating cotton candy.  You know, you get a thrill for a moment, but then, you know, afterwards you just feel terrible.  Blaise Pascal was philosopher years ago who said it this way.  “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”  And that’s an important reality to grasp this morning, even as Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.”

0:12:50.6

So, in one sense, this first “I AM” statement is a rather simple one.   Jesus is that spiritual food as we take Him into our being by faith.  He’s that spiritual food that will satisfy us, and that satisfaction is eternal.  But John 6 contains a much larger discourse about the Bread of Life.  And, you know, if you were to read it from verse 1 through verse 71, your mind, like mine did, might spin around a little bit because Jesus…I mean, it’s a pretty big discourse and a lot of teaching here.  And I’m gonna do my best that I can in the time that we have remaining to kind of break it down into some digestible part so we can understand the highlights of what Jesus is saying.  But I want to to suggest to you that there are three, if I can say it this way, three pieces of bread in this discourse that are difficult for some people to swallow.  And the first has to do with the theology of Jesus, the theology of Jesus.  And I want to pick up the reading in verse 35.

0:13:53.8

Go back to verse 35.  “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.’”  Now, verse 36, “’But I say to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe.  All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.  For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.  And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.  For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”  Sounds like a theological Rubik’s cube, doesn’t it?  I mean, He’s just kind of twisting and turning and touching on a lot of different theological areas.  I want to suggest two of them, again, that are kind of like a piece of bread that’s hard to swallow.  The first has to do with the sovereignty of God in salvation, the sovereignty of God in salvation.  What do I mean by that?  What I mean is that God sovereignly draws men and women, people like you and me, to Himself.  Jesus uses that kind of language.  He says in verse 37, “All that the Father gives me will come to me.”  He says later that, “No one can come to me unless the Father draws him to himself.”  And that’s language that leads us to an understanding that when it comes to salvation, it is the sovereign work of God.  That’s because the Bible says, “There is none that does good, not even one.  There is none who seeks after God.”  None.  Not one of us in our sinful state has the kind of heart that wants to run after God.  Because we are fallen human beings, corrupted in our operating system, as it were, by this virus called sin, we don’t naturally seek after God.  God has to draw us to Himself.  Now, again, that sounds a little bit mysterious and all that, but just understand this.  If you’re here today, and you’re here and you want to be here today, and you’re just kind of leaning in a little bit…maybe you’re investigating this thing called Christianity.  You’re kind of unsure about this Jesus and the cross, but you’re leaning in a little bit.  Take that as evidence that the sovereign God of the universe is doing His work to draw you to Himself, because you’ll never be fully satisfied and fully hunger-free in your spiritual self apart from a relationship with Him.  He created us that way.  So He sovereignly works.  I don’t completely understand the mystery of all that.  I’m kind of like Paul who says, “Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.  How unsearchable are His ways and unfathomable His truth.”  Paul just kind of throws up his hands at some point and says, “There are some things about God that even I don’t understand.”  But I’m listening to the words of Jesus in this larger discourse, and I gotta conclude that God is sovereignly at work.  I come to these worship services every week as a pastor saying, “Father, do Your work.  Do the work that I can’t do as a pastor.”  I can’t convince you to come to Jesus, only God can do that.  But you’re in a place, and you’re listening to some truth where God can take that and do something in your heart this morning to make you lean forward.  Run toward that as evidence that the Father is doing His work to give you to Jesus, to draw you to Jesus, who is the Bread of Life.

0:17:30.0

There’s another bit of theology here that’s maybe hard to swallow, not only related to the sovereignty of God, but this has to do with a future resurrection.  Jesus says a couple of times that “these that the Father gives to me I will raise up on the last day.”  Now, let me ask you a question.  Do you have the theology of the afterlife?  Have you given it any thought during this week about what happens when your time comes that your life ends on this earth and the funeral we’re attending is yours?  I’ve been a pastor for many, many years.  Done a lot of wedding.  I've also done a lot of funerals.  Don't think I’m weird, but I love to do funerals.  They’re made for the gospel.  I have the attention of…nothing like a dead body in a casket to get everybody’s attention and to think about matters of life and death, heaven, hell and eternity.  What happens 60 seconds after we die?  You ever wondered?  You ever ask that question?  One aspect of the afterlife, if you’re forming a biblical theology of it, that Jesus teaches here is that there is a future resurrection, okay.  Not reincarnation.  That’s not biblical Christianity.  That’s eastern mysticism.  That’s Hinduism and all that stuff; reincarnation.  No, we live once on this earth.  There is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgment, the Bible says.  And there is a future resurrection.  Jesus, the Bible says, is the first fruits of our resurrection.  That’s why Easter is so important.  He’s the first of many resurrections to come, including yours and mine.  Every body that goes into the grave, as I understand the scriptures, one day will rise again.  Next time you're in Washington, D.C., walk through Arlington Cemetery, grave after grave after grave, and just picture the day when every one of these graves open up.  Some rise to eternal life, some rise to eternal death.  And I don’t have time to get into all the explanation of that, but Jesus—not once, but several times in this larger discourse on the Bread of Life—talks about how one day He will raise those from the dead.  Factor that into your theology of the after-…it may be a difficult piece of bread for you to swallow, but I’m just trying to interact with the words of Jesus here and to get us to think about something more than just feeding our physical bellies, but of thinking about eternal things, things that really matter, like what’s gonna happen to you 60 seconds after you die.

0:20:35.5

Before that becomes too sobering and too convicting, let’s move on to the next piece of bread that’s hard to swallow.  Not just the theology of Jesus, but the claims of Jesus.  Let’s go now to verse 41.  It says, “So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, ‘I am the bread of life that came down from heaven.’”  They were pretty good at grumbling and complaining and murmuring.  “What’s this guy talking about?”  They did it all through the Old Testament.  Now they’re doing it in the New Testament.  Verse 42, “They said, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?  How does he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’  And Jesus said to them, ‘Do not grumble among yourselves.’”  Jesus said, “I have come down from heaven to earth.”  He said it seven times in this chapter; seven times.  Read it yourself and mark each one of them.  Unmistakable what He was saying.  He’s claiming to be God.  And the Jews understood this.  That’s why they turned to one another and said, “Wait a minute.  Who is this guy?  Isn’t this Joseph and Mary’s boy?  Isn’t He from Nazareth, that nothing town?  Didn’t we play stickball with Him in the streets?  Now He’s saying He came down from heaven to earth?”  They understood Him to be claiming to be God.  I said to you last week, you know, some people say Jesus never claimed to be God.  It’s just something that the early apostles trumped up to inflate His persona.  No, it’s all over the New Testament and in the Gospels that record Jesus’s life, the reliable Gospels, the best record we have of Jesus’s life.  And here in the “I AM” statements, He does the same.

0:22:22.4

He not only claims to be God, but in this discourse about the Bread of Life, He points them to the cross.  Scroll down to verse 51.  He says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.  And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  Now He’s getting more specific, isn’t He?  And for those who have ears to hear, they understand He’s talking about the cross here.  We, looking back, understand that.  Read that again.  He says, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  He’s pointing to the cross of Christ.  So the claims of Jesus to be God, to be the sacrifice of God on the cross, to be the One who will rise from the dead, I mean it’s all woven into the discourse here.  It may be a piece of bread that’s hard for you to swallow.

0:23:27.9

But here’s the third one that’s even more difficult to swallow.  This has to do with the demands of Jesus.  Let’s read on in verse 52.  It says, “Then the Jews disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’  And Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.’”  There it is again.  “’For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.  Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.’”  Now, the people there 2000 years ago, they’re listening to this.  They’re listening to Jesus say, “I am the bread of life.  I am the Bread who came down from heaven.”  And He’s hearing them say, “Now, here’s the demand.  You need to eat my flesh and drink my blood.”  If I were to walk in here last week on the first week that I’m your pastor and say, “I want you to eat my flesh and drink my blood,” you would look at the search committee and go, “What kind of whack job did we get as our pastor?  Is he a cannibal?  Is he a vampire?”  For the first three centuries of Christianity, the Roman Empire persecuted Christians.  And it wasn’t until the conversion of Constantine around 312 A.D. that that persecution stopped.  But up until that time the Roman Empire would speak fear into the hearts of unbelievers and say, “Those Christians are cannibals.  They’re gonna eat your children and drink their blood,” based on this teaching here.  That’s just craziness.  That’s just political spin.  That’s not what Jesus was talking about here.  He’s not a cannibal.  He’s not a vampire.  The Catholic Church uses this teaching to substantiate their view of communion, the Lord’s Supper.  In Catholic dogma, communion is described as something called transubstantiation.  Now, there’s a word that you weren’t thinking about this morning before you came to church this morning.  But transubstantiation in the Catholic Church means that the bread and the juice literally transforms into the body and the blood of Jesus.  And in the Catholic Church there are seven sacraments, communion being one of them.  A sacrament confers grace and is necessary for salvation.  So they built this big works-based salvation experience, part of which is if you want salvation you have to come and take communion every week based upon this teaching where Jesus says to “eat my flesh and drink my blood”.  Well, from a protestant perspective, I can just tell you it’s a huge stretch to find communion and the Lord’s Supper in this Bread of Life discourse.  First of all, it’s a long time before Jesus even introduces the Lord’s Supper on the night before He was crucified in the upper room with His disciples.  He’s not talking about communion here.

0:26:42.6

So if He isn’t a cannibal and if He isn’t a vampire and if we’re not talking about communion in the Catholic kind of way, what in the world was Jesus talking about when He says, “I am the bread of life.  Eat my flesh and drink my blood.”  Scholars have called this one of the hard, hard sayings of Jesus, because a little bit later in verse 66 it says, “After this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.”  It was a piece of bread that was hard for them to swallow.  And they said, “I don’t want anything to do with a guy like that.”  So what are we to make of this?  Well, let’s think a little bit of our relationship with food.  I think this is a lot simpler than what others have complicated it by.  Think about our relationship with food, and think about somebody who has a purely intellectual relationship with food.  This is somebody who loves to read recipes.  This is somebody who just pours over the ingredients in his or her mind and just loves to read the recipes and how the food is brought together.  They read the writings of great chefs and the recipe books of great chefs.  And they study food.  And they even look for hours on end at pictures of beautiful meals on tables.  But they never actually sit down and take food into their body.  They just have an intellectual relationship with it.  You know what happens to somebody who has an intellectual relationship with food?  They die.  They die.  You can’t have an intellectual relationship with food and live, because food is meant to be ingested into the body so that it becomes one with the body.  And all those nutrients, you know, make their way through the body.  And you know the old phrase, “you are what you eat.”  It’s true, physically.  Well, it’s the same way spiritually.  You can’t just have an intellectual relationship with God and expect to have spiritual life.  It takes more than that.  In fact, James, the half-brother of Jesus, remember what James said in his New Testament letter, chapter 2 and verse 19?  He says, “You believe that God is one?”  And, by the way, that’s good monotheistic theology.  “You believe that God is one?  That’s great.  You’re one with the devils, because they believe the same thing and they tremble with that knowledge.”  You can have an intellectual knowledge of God where you study about Jesus.  You read books about Him.  You come and listen to speakers who talk to you about Christianity.  But you’ve never personally ingested the Lord Jesus Christ by faith.  You see, there’s a big difference between and intellectual relationship with food and an intimate relationship with one.  Okay?  That’s the difference between life and death.  And there is a difference in the spiritual realm between an intellectual relationship with God and an intimate relationship with Him.  Jesus said, “Eat my flesh.  Drink my blood.”  He’s speaking metaphorically.  He’s speaking spiritually.  By faith, you’ve got to take Him into yourself.

0:30:00.9

Verse 51 gives us the clue here.  He says, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  Now, scroll down to verse 56.  “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood,” listen to this, “abides in me, and I in him.”  That’s intimacy language.  And it’s reminiscent of another “I AM” that we’ll get to in about six or seven weeks, the last one that He spoke in the upper room with His disciples on the night before He was crucified.  He said, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.”  He used that to describe the intimacy that we’re to have with Him.  And He says, “Let my word in abide in you.  Let me abide in you, my words abide in you.  Apart from me you can do nothing.”  You want to experience intimacy with the almighty?  Wait ‘til we get to that seventh “I AM”.  But He gives a hint to it here.  “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood, this is the kind of relationship I want with you.”  He says, “I don’t want just mere intellectualism.  I want life.  I want intimacy.”  Imagine if all you had was an intellectual relationship with your spouse.  Your marriage wouldn’t be that great.  And, likewise, Jesus wants us to have an intimate relationship with Him, where, by faith, we ingest Him into every facet of our being.  Why?  Because He’s the only one that can satisfy the deepest hunger and thirst in your soul that was written into the software of your being.  Oh, you can try to take in, you know, sex and drugs and money and success and power and all of that.  But ultimately it’ll leave you with a bad stomachache.  Only Jesus will satisfy us.  

0:31:55.5

So, yes, in a sense, the price of bread isn’t what it used to be.  But here’s the good news.  The price of your salvation and mine was paid for in full at the cross by the One who said, “I am the bread of life.”  Here’s the other bit of good news this morning.  You’re worth a whole lot more than a loaf of bread to God, a whole lot more.  And if you have any doubts about that, just look at the cross of Christ and just kneel before that cross long enough until you get a sense of how much God loves you.  That He would send His one and only Son from heaven to earth.  That Jesus would humble Himself as He did.  That He would go to a cross, where the very ones He created nailed Him to that cross and beat Him and spit upon Him.  That was all part of the Father’s plan.  It was all part of the Father’s will.  It was all part of His sovereign way of providing redemption for us and forgiveness.  It was the only way He could solve the problem between sinful man and a holy God. Somebody had to pay the price for the bread.  God loves you so much, friend, that He sent His only Son, this Jesus who said, “I am the bread of life.”  Are you hungry today?  I mean, hungry for something that…some sense of satisfaction that you’ve never found in life?  Are you Mick Jagger this morning, saying, “I just can’t get any satisfaction”?  Then listen maybe for the first time this morning to the words of Jesus.  They echo through the hallways of history, all the way from 2000 years ago on that little hillside overlooking the beautiful Sea of Galilee, where He said to those folks, “I am the bread of life.  I am the bread of life.  He who comes to me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”  Will you come today?  Will you believe today?  To those who believe, to those who receive Him, to those He gave the right to become children of God, the scripture says.  And that invitation is for every one of us in this room.  Let’s pray together.

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Father, thank You so much for Your Word.  And thank You for Jesus, who is the Great, Great I AM.  He said, “I am the bread of life.”  And, Father, it says something about me.  It says something about every one of us in this room.  We’re hungry.  We’re hungry to make sense out of life.  We’re hungry to satisfy that stomachache, that ache within our heart and within our soul.  And we’ve tried a lot of different things.  And for that, would You forgive us?  We’ve tried to spend money for what is not bread and our wages for what does not satisfy, as the prophet Isaiah says.  But today, Father, we want all of that to change.  By faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, will You draw men and women to You today?  Some who have never taken that step to come to the cross of Christ and to look up into the eyes of the Bread of Life and say, “I believe.  I believe in Jesus.  God, give me this bread always.”  That was the cry of the people.  “Give us this bread always.”  Father, thank You that the Bread of Life came down from heaven and gave His flesh for us.  By faith, help us to eat Him and to drink Him.  And we pray this in Jesus’s name and for His sake, amen.

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